Yesterday I re-published one of my favorite short stories, "The Old Organ Trail." In keeping with my practice of providing the afterwords I include with these published stories for free, what follows is the tale of how I came to write (and almost gave away my chance to write) the story that would become my first science fiction sale. So you don't have to pony up 99c for this part; just enjoy. Herewith, how I found the Old Organ Trail.

In 1985, I had sold a couple of short fiction pieces to mainstream markets, but had yet to make a sale in science fiction and fantasy. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but even though most of the short fiction markets were SF/F publications even that long ago, there were still too few for the number of people wanting to break into them. I got back some great rejections, but couldn’t get a look in to the magazines of the day. I was by turns determined to break in to the science fiction field and certain I didn’t have what it took to write science fiction. Mind you, I didn’t know what that mysterious quality might be, but I spent about half my time thinking that much like green eyes or curly hair, I hadn’t been blessed with it.

In the spring of that year I went to a science fiction convention and heard Algis Budrys speaking about the quarterly Writers of the Future Contest, which was going into its second year at the time. I went to the WotF party that night, sat around with Algis and Dean Wesley Smith (who had just had a story appear in Writers of the Future, Volume I) and a lot of other pros and hopefuls. Algis told us about the structure he believed lurked at the center of every story, and how to use it to write fiction (I talk about this in a little more detail in the afterword to “Hole in the Wall,” which is reprinted on my blog here). It was a good contest, and as far as I know it still is. The prizes are generous, and it’s given writers far more prominent than I their kick-start in writing SF/F. I decided then and there that I'd submit a story every quarter until they either gave me a prize or told me to bugger off.

“The Old Organ Trail” was my third quarterly submission to the contest. One evening in December of 1985, I got a phone call from the contest director informing me I’d won first prize in the fourth quarter of that year’s contest and that I’d also be getting an offer for the story from Algis, who was editing the anthology. So in addition to the $1,000 prize money for the quarter, I made another princely sum in 1980s dollars from the sale of the story. I was so gobsmacked I completely forgot how I almost gave it all away...

(CUE SCOOBY-DOO FLASHBACK FX)

Some months previous to writing the story, I’d been driving down California Highway 41, as I often did on my way from home to work, and I encountered a sign for Interstate Highway 299, the historical Old Oregon Trail. On this particular morning my sleep-deprived eyes mis-read the sign. “Oh, that’s funny!” I thought when I realized I’d accidentally seen the words “The Old Organ Trail.” “That’d make a good story title,” was the next thing I thought, but I dismissed it almost instantly. After all, the title was clearly humor, and I was a serious writer. Of serious stories. I was still a little new to the whole fiction writing business, and took it all rather seriously.

I had a friend, however, who was a natural humorist and a good writer. I approached him with my humorous title. “I’ll never write the story that goes with this,” I told him, “so feel free to use it if you can.” Some weeks or months went by. I was out having cheap Mexican food with my humorist friend, and I asked him if he’d ever done anything with that story title. “No,” he said. “I keep thinking it’s actually your story after all.”

I started to go into my “I don’t do humor” routine, but he just said “Why don’t you tell me what the story’s about?” “It’s about my Uncle Pewtie,” I began. I had not then, and have not now, any idea where those words came from. “He used to be a liverlegger, but he’s retired now…well, whaddya know? Maybe it is my story.”

And it was. And my friend was and is a wise man. And once I started writing, the words just wouldn’t stop. And when it won a contest and was published in a paperback anthology, I knew I’d turned a corner I could never un-turn. I was a science fiction writer.

A few months after winning the contest quarter, Algis invited me to participate in the first Writers of the Future workshop. They hold these for the contest winners every year now, but this was a test run to see if the idea was a good one. Each invitee had to pay for his or her own travel, food, and lodging; the instruction was free.

And what instruction it was! Algis’s connections with the movers and shakers of the golden age went back to his teenage years, and it would have been hard to think of any well-known SF writer who didn’t consider him either a friend or a mentor—usually both. He had assembled a who’s who of science fiction to spend a week teaching us in Taos, New Mexico: Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson, Gene Wolfe, and Algis himself. When that week was done, I had a better grasp on what I was doing as a writer than I’d ever known or imagined. I had knowledge of the publishing business I would have spent years acquiring the hard way. And I had some new friends who are now treasured old friends. I went home and used my new knowledge to start writing better stories.

It took me a few years to make my next SF/F sale, but I was writing the whole time, and also writing for a living in the computer games industry. When I got to feeling down about it, I could always look at that copy of the anthology in my bookshelf and know I was doing something right, and if I did it then, I could do it again. Eventually the sales came, and the checks, and some award nominations, and a full-time writing day job, and eventually I wrote and sold some novels. I learned that mastery isn’t a target, but a never-ending process, and that writing success isn’t so much a destination as a journey that all writers are on all the time. If you’re on that journey, I’ll see you on the road. Keep an eye peeled for liverleggers.

The story behind the story begins with two writers working at a large computer game company in the early 1990s, in a cubicle of a nice size for one writer. One small writer who doesn't move around much.

But as luck would have it, it holds two—a mother-daughter team whose duties include writing ads, magazine articles, sales copy, box copy, and documentation, and editing game designers' in-game text. Two desks and two writers pushed up against one another 8 hours a day (when we were lucky) five days a week, for more than a year. That's why we made the big bucks.

Oh, wait...the pay was crap.

Well anyway, that's why we collaborated at work, and we also wrote together on our own time. And this particular collaboration has recently been dusted off and re-imagined as what we think is a better story with more interesting characters than when it was originally published in Tomorrow SF, in 1995, edited by Algis Budrys.

Kidnapped by Aliens!, the Making-Of Special

What follows is the afterword included in the back of the book that is now live on amazon.com. You can read it here even if you don't shell out 99c. But of course you're welcome to do that, too. So without further ado...

BMcK: I remember how we started writing this. We were working at Sierra On-Line around 1991. We shared a cubicle sized for one, so we wrote in one another’s pockets for well over a year.

This was about the same time we were working on “Remarkable Things,” another story set in the universe of tabloid stories, though I don’t remember which one came first. Anyhow, you mentioned someone you’d like to see “disappeared,” and quickly amended that you didn’t want any harm to come to them, but maybe they could just be kidnapped by aliens.

As so often happened in those days, one of us said “I feel a story coming on,” then we said in unison, “Kidnapped by Aliens!” And so the title was born, exclamation point and all.

I’ve lost some brain cells were this story’s concerned. We both left Sierra in 1991, but if it appeared in Tomorrow SF in 1995, we couldn’t have sold it any earlier than 1994. Did we send it to a lot of other editors first?

MMcK: Yeah, it made the rounds before Algis Budrys decided it was just the thing for his magazine. And I remember that moment. Re-reading the original draft of the story, it hit me that we were more cynical in those days. Our main character wasn’t very likable from where I’m standing now. It made me happy to give him a workover for this release—he’s a better man for it.

BMcK: Yeah, I wouldn’t like that guy (er, Guy) much now. He was a lot shallower. I think we were playing the humor angle a little harder back then, and painting with broader strokes. It’s been a real education in how we operate as writers to go back over this story.

MMcK: Yeah, it was satisfying to bring it up to a new standard. We’re publishing a better story than we did back then.

So, we should talk about how we collaborate. Over the years we’ve encountered so many writing-team permutations, and I think they’ve all had a different way of working together.

BMcK: Right. Some partnerships have one person do a rough, the other polish it. Some divide characters between them. And I remember that one well known science fiction writing team we were on a panel with said that no-one should ever collaborate unless there was no other way to get the story written. I’m glad we didn’t hear that before we started, because in our experience, collaboration was tremendous fun.

Our particular method of collaboration was usually to sit down and throw ideas around and get an overview of the story and events, which was open to change as we went along, of course. Then somebody would start. In this case, it was you who wrote the opening scene. Then we’d trade back and forth until we got to the end. Then we’d fiddle with it.

MMcK: Re-reading it, I can honestly say I don’t know who wrote what 99% of the time. But back then, we’d each write a scene, hand it off, edit the other person’s work and then write the next scene. And we always knew who was responsible for what…except for that one time.

BMcK: Ah, yes. That one time. We were collaborating on “Remarkable Things,” which was about two very different families who lived next door to one another. The children get acquainted as the story opens, and at some point we realized that the mothers would have to get together for coffee and get to know one another. The problem was, neither of us really wanted to write the scene. “I think you should write it.” “No, I think you should.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

So one day the scene appears in the latest draft, and one of us says, “Hey, good job on the Moms scene,” and the other one says, “What’re you talkin’ about? You wrote it.” “No, you did.” “I totally didn’t.” We finally decided our “third writer” must have written it. None of the stories we collaborated on ended up much like what either of us did on our own. In fact, fellow writers trying to guess who’d written which scene were almost always wrong. Between us we made a third writer.

MMcK: It was so bizarre. We were both so certain we hadn’t written it! Maybe it was a ghost writer…

Anyway, I think that’s one thing a lot of writing teams have in common. Collaboration is a different way of creating—I think we were able to egg each other on and validate each other’s ideas in a way that the solitary writer can’t. Writing is generally a lonely business and writers spend a lot of time doubting themselves, so these partnerships can be sort of freeing in a way.

BMcK: Exactly. Half the story is someone else’s responsibility; somehow it’s easier to just have fun with it.

So all these years later we come back to this story. We still like the fun of the idea, but Guy and Carol-Ann needed some major tweaking to make them more likable. And there were anachronisms we needed to zap, too. In the original story, Guy wears a tie to go to work at a software company. Back then there were still a few companies—especially in productivity software, which is what Guy writes for—where people still dressed up to go to work. But not these days. Zap! Guy goes to watch a video, but wait—it’s a VHS tape! Zap!

MMcK: Yes, in order for the story to work in this century, we had to lose anything that would thrown the reader out of the story. In a few years, DVDs might seem ridiculous, but for now the story flows more naturally with these updates in place. And as I said, I think overall we’re publishing a better story this century than we did in the last one.